Sheryl Sandberg Will Become COO of Facebook — Facebook will announce that it will hire top Google executive Sheryl Sandberg as COO this afternoon, in a major hire that is sure to shake up the company and also deliver a blow to rival Google. — At Google (GOOG), Sandberg is the vice president …

Highlights from Apple's Shareholder Meeting — Details are starting to emerge from Apple's meeting with shareholders, taking place in Cupertino today. Among the tasty bits: — The iPhone will launch in China Asia this year. (We knew that. When? And in what countries?!?)

IAC's Ask.com to Cut 8% of Staff — Ask.com announced an internal restructuring that eliminates 40 jobs as well as plans to turn back the search engine's focus to better answering search queries posed as questions. — The job cuts, which amount to roughly 8% of the company's existing work force …

Demand Media Buys Pluck for $75 million — Demand Media, a big buyer and operator of Internet domain name companies, completed negotiations to acquire Austin-based Pluck last night after about two months of negotiations. The price is not being disclosed but is rumored to be in the $50 million range.

Microsoft Research shows new search projects — Opening its annual TechFest event in Redmond this morning, Microsoft Research showed a pair of projects meant to help people make “collaborative” Web searches. — One, SearchTogether, is an Internet Explorer plugin that puts a sidebar into the browser.

Google Tests Additional Search Box Within Search Results — Tamar tipped me off to people seeing secondary search boxes in the Google search results. I see them myself now. For example a search on amazon returns this search box directly under the snippet but above the URL, here is a picture:

Backing BuddyPress — Some of you may remember when I wrote about Chickspeak, a WordPress MU-based social network. Andy Peatling, the fellow behind it, later decided to recreate the work he had done as an Open Source effort he called BuddyPress. And it was good.

1,000 True Fans — The long tail is famously good news for two classes of people; a few lucky aggregators, such as Amazon and Netflix, and 6 billion consumers. Of those two, I think consumers earn the greater reward from the wealth hidden in infinite niches. — But the long tail is a decidedly mixed blessing for creators.

The New Workplace Rules: No Video-Watching — Carriage Services Inc., a Houston funeral-services company, recently discovered that 70% of the workers in its 125-person headquarters watched videos on Web sites like Google Inc.'s YouTube and News Corp.'s MySpace for about an hour a day.

Hack into a Windows PC - no password needed — A security consultant based in New Zealand has released a tool that can unlock Windows computers in seconds without the need for a password. — Adam Boileau first demonstrated the hack, which affects Windows XP computers but has not yet …

When the music costs nothing, why do freetards prefer to leech? — As we reported yesterday, Nine Inch Nails has followed the Radiohead example and is giving the music away for free. Not all of it, but nine of the thirty six tracks from Trent Reznor's instrumental LP Ghosts I-IV are available for free, with a PDF thrown in.